The “news” media, in a typical anti-gun-rights frenzy, has gone off the rails in flat-out deception about a simple move by our new president to reestablish the rule of law.

Backstory: When you get old enough for social security payments, the system allows you to designate a “representative payee,” so your benefits (payment checks) can go to a third person you select. That person can deposit them and basically handle your finances, checkbook, bills and other matters for you, according to your instructions. It’s a common practice, making life easier. Typically, people select a spouse, child, accountant, lawyer or other trusted advisor.

The issue: Former president Hussein-Obama, whose middle name we’re not supposed to mention for reasons that remain unclear, especially since he steadfastly refuses to release the stack of documents that would clarify his pedigree far more significantly than the furor raised over the current president’s legally private tax returns, claimed that third-party payment plan revokes your Second Amendment rights. Experts agree it was an outrageous de facto illegal dictate from a decidedly anti-gun-rights office holder. B.H. Obama constantly denies his self-evident anti-rights position and acts.

According to Hussein-Obama shortly before leaving office in Dec. 2016, who instructed the Social Security Administration to act without an act of Congress -- assigning a designated payee means you are “adjudicated as a mental defective.” That is a condition in federal gun statute that makes you “a prohibited possessor” (18 USC §922) banned from gun ownership. Assigning a payee however is not an adjudication, and says nothing about your mental state. It does say something about the former White House occupant’s mental state.

Tens of thousands of decent hard-working Americans on social security would have summarily lost their constitutional right to keep and bear arms under this stroke of a pen. Any arms they owned would have become contraband, subject to confiscation. Purchase of new ones, or ammunition, would have been forbidden. Their names were to be entered into the centralized federal “NICS” database of people whose gun rights have been lost.

Congress acted to rescind the illegal Obama abomination soon after president Trump took office, prompting the political left to go berserk. Locally, channel 12 (NBC News) interviewed me about the decision to rescind Obama’s order. The station used one fair sentence from a 20-minute videotaping, then ran a straw poll asking, “Should crazy people be allowed to have guns?” and got a 97% “No” response. It is unclear whether that is fake news, phony news, prejudice, fantasy or something else. A clip of the segment cannot be found on their website. Thanks to Chris Cox of the NRA who researched the media quotes used in this piece.

About the Author

Freelance writer Alan Korwin is a founder and past president of the Arizona Book Publishing Association. With his wife Cheryl he operates Bloomfield Press, the largest producer and distributor of gun-law books in the country. Here writing as "The Uninvited Ombudsman," Alan covers the day's stories as they ought to read. Read more.